PDF.ai vs ChatPDF  — Which Is Better?

AI is currently changing the world in terms of how we all do work, and one of the most popular ways that people use AI is to chat with a PDF or text document to quickly extract information without having to read the entire text document end-to-end. This is useful for both students and employees at companies alike because we all know reading and extracting information takes an incredibly long time.

Two of the biggest competitors in the space are pdf.ai and chatpdf.com. In this article we will put these two pieces of software head-to-head with each other to see which one you like best.

Price

pdf.ai has the following 4 pricing tiers.

• Hobby $0/month

  • 1 pdf uploads

  • 500 questions/month

  • 10mb max file size

• Pro $15/month ($10/month if you pay annually)

  • 100 pdf uploads

  • 5000 monthly questions

  • 50mb max file size

• Ultimate $25/month ($20/month if you pay annually)

  • unlimited pdf uploads

  • unlimited questions a month

  • 50mb max file size

  • limited API access

• Enterprise $50/month

  • unlimited pdf uploads

  • unlimited questions a month

  • 50mb max file size

  • unlimited pay-as-you-go API access

The biggest difference is the number of questions you can ask, the number of PDFs you can upload, maximum file size, and access to their API.

chatpdf.com has a much simpler pricing structure of $20/month or $140/year (~$11/month) if you pay annually.

Features

At the end of the day, the core features of both pdf.ai and chatpdf.com are very similar. They let you chat with your pdfs and extract knowledge from them really quickly and they both do a great job at doing so. However, each one has their own "X factor" that makes them special.

pdf.ai has the following special features

• Chat with multiple PDFs to get an answer across multiple documents easily

• GPT-4 support — a more powerful AI model

• OCR support — pdf.ai automatically extracts text from images that you can chat with

• Team support — create and share documents between teams

• Chrome extension — chat with PDFs immediately from your browser

chatpdf.com doesn't have as many special features and is a much simpler product, but their big "X factor" is the fact that you get access to jenni.ai, an AI writing tool that helps you write papers faster.

Depending on what your needs are in your life, unlimited access to jenni.ai could be the biggest selling point to choose chatpdf.com over pdf.ai

Alternatives

An alternative chat pdf software that you might want to check out is nexusresearch.ai.

In terms of pricing, it is only $7/month or $50/year ($4/month) if you pay annually. So it is significantly cheaper than chatpdf.com or pdf.ai. And at that price point it still give you access to unlimited PDF uploads and and unlimited questions.

Nexus is slightly different compared to chatpdf.com and pdf.ai in that everything is separated into "research projects" and within each project you can upload papers. When you go to chat with your papers, there is also a designated section where you can take notes while reading your paper. You can take notes that are shared throughout the entire project or you can take notes about that specific paper that you are reading — a feature that neither chatpdf.com or pdf.ai has.

Lastly, Nexus has a unique multipaper chat feature which lets you ask one question to multiple papers at once, allowing you to compare and contrast answers between multiple papers. Then, if you see an interesting answer, you can dive into a 1 on 1 chat with that paper to learn more details about it.

Check it out here if you are interested.

Conclusion

In the end, you cannot go wrong with any of these options. Using AI in your day-to-day work can significantly improve the speed at which you work, and you should definitely begin making it a part of your daily life now.